Hello everyone!
i'm looking for thoughts and opinions on what vehicles a Rogue Trader and his Entourage would use. I'm doing an house rule update on the armory and career section of the book for making it more compatible with DH2.0 or OW Rule set.

What comes to mind would be single crew vehicles and some transport vehicles, like rhinos and Chimeras. I find it difficult to see a Rogue Trader and companions take to the field in say a Leman Russ, or a baneblade for that matter. as these vehicles are more for their household troops.

If a Rogue Trader would go into battle into something more heavily armored I'd say a Imperial Knight walker. Or are those things restricted to just specific noble houses or something lore wise?

What are your ideas?

I'd think they'd use a command vehicle of some sort. The only ones I can think of off-hand are the Damocles Rhino and the Salamander Command Tank. A young and foppish Rogue Trader might go for a motorcycle that matches his hat, but an Imperial Knight with a Mechadendrite Johnson would fit the bill, too.

Any idea for stats for an Imperial knight?

Mechadendrite Johnson

I think I found the name of my next Explorator

Why bother with stats? Just have your player roll the dice and tell them they succeed.

My Rogue Trader and his Retinue use a Gun Cutter for most of our planetary travels. It's better than using a ground vehicle, heavily armed, and is spacecraft with staterooms and accommodations for six people. I even have enough room in there for a land speeder.

Speaking of Space and air flights.
What does an Dynasty come with actually? say for a starter group they got their space ship. how about means to reach a the planet or where they are going to. as far i know the big space ships cant land on planets.

i usually solve this with that they get to the surface with a shuttle of some sort. but are there any rules that says what they start with and how many vehicles they have at their disposal . because how shall you deal with it when they lose a shuttle. will they get stuck on the planet they are on or should just give them a new one and make a roll on the misfortune table for their profit?

Per the fluff, anything smaller than a light cruiser can land on a planet.

As for shuttles etc, there are guidelines which I currently can't put my finger on - X craft per 5 pts of hull space. Any large vessel is going to require at least a few lifters and launches and so forth, like ship's boats from the Age of Sail, so should effectively 'come with' them, but whether your Rogue Trader wants to step out of a cargo lifter is up to them

EDIT: BfK, page 11, dark grey box at the top - 1 lighter, shuttle or lifter per 5 pts of Space; a cargo hold component adds an extra 4 vehicles. Personally I equate [1 homebrew Baum lifter to] 2 barges to 4 cutters to 8 fighters.

People have done the math here before. Without a small army of cargo shuttles it would impossible to fill a ship's cargo hold in any reasonable time. That's why the space stations become so necessary.

Right, but for food and supplies it's reasonably practical.

Mmmm. Not buying that. Let's just look at a single item. Water. The average person in the US uses 80-100 gallons per day. Yeah I know, 40k is darkity dark dark, and Americans are extravagant in their water usage, but I'm not counting in what people use to water their grass, nor am I averaging industrial and household numbers.

So let's say that the working stiffs on your ship are rationed to a mere 1 gallon per day for drinking, 1 gallon per day for cooking, never flush the head, and only get 1 bath per month. That's about 3.2 gallons per day per person. So your light cruiser uses up 768 tons of water per day, or slightly less than 20 Halo Barges worth of cargo capacity. Never mind that your crew are constantly on the verge of revolting, and I'm not talking about their smell, which is also revolting.

Oh no! Did someone just interject logistics into the conversation? I apologize. My mind was drifting. Now back to the universe of 40k.

Seriously, that's why I have ships in my campaigns with much larger landing barges, many more landing barges, very long loading times, and orbital stations anywhere people are expecting to routinely load and offload cargo. I also figure that's one reason the ships are sooooo large. It takes a lot of space to carry life support.

Speaking of Space and air flights.

What does an Dynasty come with actually? say for a starter group they got their space ship. how about means to reach a the planet or where they are going to. as far i know the big space ships cant land on planets.

i usually solve this with that they get to the surface with a shuttle of some sort. but are there any rules that says what they start with and how many vehicles they have at their disposal . because how shall you deal with it when they lose a shuttle. will they get stuck on the planet they are on or should just give them a new one and make a roll on the misfortune table for their profit?

When we started our campaign, we started with one basic shuttle per 10 Ship Points we had available (we had almost 70 points). These shuttles aren't armed, they're used mainly for cargo, and aren't anything special. Also, there are labor servitors that do a lot of the cargo lifting, and for bigger jobs they have forklifts, pallet-jacks, the usual, so in general we go with what's assumed would be necessary for a Rogue Trader to do the basic job of trade.

We also have a house rule that most garden variety vehicles found in the Imperium are relatively Common in Availability, things like basic motorcycles, cars, trucks, even aircraft, some speeders, and boats, that aren't specifically listed in any of the books will be Common, particularly if you go to the Calixus Sector to get them. We have bicycles in our ship (a Conquest-class Star Galleon) for the crew to use, because by and large we don't let the majority of the crew use the service trams and lifts; those are for officers and, naturally, us. Of course, Availability for common vehicles found in the Imperium changes dramatically from world to world, especially if you go into the Expanse.

My retinue and I get stuck on planets quite a bit. Fortunately we have a Teleportarium (but we have special rules for how this works). Getting stuck can be an adventure in itself. If we get stuck, the thing, naturally, to do is contact the ship and have another shuttle sent down. Sometimes that's problematic.

Recently, because we don't often like to use the Teleportarium because it's not too reliable, I sent down my Missionary and Arch-Militant along with a few troops down to a lost Imperial world that was colonized 7,000 years ago. We just arrived as they were about to launch their first moon mission. My Missionary and Arch-Militant were caught by the local authorities as they were assessing the planet, because my initial plan was to learn more about them before I came barging in, orbiting the planet, and reintroducing them to the Imperium again (felt it was more profitable to avoid civil unrest and making examples). They had their micro-beads and weapons confiscated, and they had to figure out how to escape. I was getting ready to get them out, using the Teleportarium with my Astropath Transcendant and his Choir finding them and operating the controls. Fortunately, they escaped, and were able to use a local radio to contact the ship, and I didn't have to risk a failure. So, I sent down myself, the Explorator and a few of my heavily armed troops in my gun cutter to get them out, and we had to avoid fighter interception to do it. Great fun.

When we started our campaign, we started with one basic shuttle per 10 Ship Points we had available (we had almost 70 points). These shuttles aren't armed, they're used mainly for cargo, and aren't anything special.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's so hard to conceptualize just how immense these ships really are. The very notion that 7 shuttles can resupply a ship this large is preposterous. These ships carry enough supplies for the crew and the onboard industry for a year or more. To resupply would take something on the order of 10 ^{4 -6} shuttle runs. If we use the low end of that scale, those 7 shuttles, given Halo Barges RAW, would have to make over 1400 runs each.

Hey, we handwave a lot of stuff away, and if you can suspend your disbelief with a handful of shuttles, go for it. Unfortunately for me, I took more math in school.

When we started our campaign, we started with one basic shuttle per 10 Ship Points we had available (we had almost 70 points). These shuttles aren't armed, they're used mainly for cargo, and aren't anything special.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's so hard to conceptualize just how immense these ships really are. The very notion that 7 shuttles can resupply a ship this large is preposterous. These ships carry enough supplies for the crew and the onboard industry for a year or more. To resupply would take something on the order of 10 ^{4 -6} shuttle runs. If we use the low end of that scale, those 7 shuttles, given Halo Barges RAW, would have to make over 1400 runs each.

Hey, we handwave a lot of stuff away, and if you can suspend your disbelief with a handful of shuttles, go for it. Unfortunately for me, I took more math in school.

Well, I look at things a little differently. For my ship, the Conquest Star-Galleon Emperor's Partisan , she's a 5.1 km ship with a crew of 65,000. I figure each person aboard needs a pound of food a day, which comes out to 975,000 tons a month! That sounds like a lot, but, not when you consider how modern cargo vessels consider volume and weight, in terms of what is called Gross Tons and Gross Register Tons.

GT/GRT is a measure of volume on a ship. One GRT is equivalent, in space, to 100 cubic feet of cargo space. This is not to be confused with Deadweight Tonnage, which is the weight that a ship can safely carry, which includes everything except the weight and displacement of the ship.

The longest ship, before she was broken up, was the Seawise Giant , an oil tanker that was 458.5 meters long, with a DWT of 564,650 tons, and a GRT of 260,000 tons (roughly).

The Partisan is just over ten times her size and volume. Now, all ships are different and a Star-Galleon might be arranged somewhat differently, due to all the other things she has to carry, such as guns, but if we can at least get her DWT, that would be 5,646,500 tons, more given her size. And that does not include the weight of the ship herself. I presume a Star-Galleon is not an oil tanker, and is not a container ship, but given her guns and other things she has on board, I'd put her GRT at least a third of her overall DWT. That would mean she's generally got a carrying capacity of 1.9 million GRT. So, I think I can easily manage a month of food for the crew, and have ammo, with cargo space available. Of course, GRT does not include landing bays and the shuttles and Gun-Cutter I have aboard.

So you're right, it would take a lot of cargo shuttles to fully restock a Star-Galleon. Also, a pound of food is not a lot of food per person, and I presume my ship has livestock aboard, and that each family at every station, from the guns to the auspexes and the tram operators and such, keeps something around for continual nourishment, and the ratings get the scraps. Water gets reclaimed. I also have a lot of servitors aboard, most of whom aren't too picky about what they're eating. A fifth of the crew is servitors. So that can cut down on the food supplies pretty nicely.

Starports are vital. In fact, I'm hoping that if there is a 2nd Edition of Rogue Trader that somewhere they address building or transporting these into place. Maybe the Imperial Navy does that? I don't know.

Also, on my ship, the Retinue and myself, and the bridge crew, does not eat what the rest of the crew eats. There is a pecking order, and rank does have its privileges.

My main concern, of late, has been taking raw goods off a planet for the Emperor's Tithe. We've considered that one ship could not possibly carry it all in one trip, so several trips are to be made. Now I'm thinking of hijacking other ships to do help do this, so I'm not going back and forth to Port Wander all the time.

Oh no! Did someone just interject logistics into the conversation? I apologize. My mind was drifting. Now back to the universe of 40k.

No need to be an arse about it. You and I have spoken elsewhere about the pros and cons of verisimilitude.

You might also notice my mentioning that I use the Baum lifter , rather larger than the standard Halo barge; 10 Baums, 36 trips each brings me 110,000 metric tons. This is sufficient for my purposes.

In addition water, the most recyclable of resources, is perhaps not the best gauge in this situation.

Sorry, I really wasn't trying to being an ass, but I know it's hard to tell sometimes when speaking with me. That was actually me poking fun at myself. Logistics was one my early careers in life, bores the dickens out of most people, but somehow seems to pique my curiosity.

You mention the recycle-ability of water and that brings up the same question in other life support, such as oxygen. There is a ship component for recycling people into servitors, and many people assume there's another producing corpse-starch. So yes, reusing resources has to figure into the conversation somewhere.

Wayfinder, my current players also use a Conquest. We've done our estimating about its measurements and I'm going to have to disagree with your math. Your example of the Seawise Giant is based on a hull measuring approx. 469m x 69m x 70m, giving us 2,265,270m ³ . You've stated that 2,265,270m ³ = 260,000 GRT. Le'ts run with that figure.

A Star Galleon measures 5100m x 700m x 1760m (that last measurement is based on the picture in BFK, not including spires of course), or 6,283,200,000m ³ . That means the galleon is actually about 2,700 times the size of the Seawise Giant, not 10 times.

I've said before, people have a hard time conceptualizing the insides of these ships, and their real size. Here is an excerpt of the description of the Fiat Justicia , the Star Galleon in our campaign.

The Fiat Justicia is an ancient ship, dating back to at least the 36th Millennia. The scale of the ship is difficult to imagine. While the crew numbers 65,000, there are entire households and communities on board, bringing the ship’s total population to nearly 400,000. There are 2 main cargo holds. Each is large enough to hold 400 Nimitz -class aircraft carriers. The ship has 79 main decks and over 500 lesser decks. There are nearly 10,000 miles of main corridors and over 25,000 miles of secondary passageways, not including crawl spaces. There are 672 passenger elevators and 32 enormous cargo lifts, each served by 8 ceiling-mounted cranes capable of lifting skyscrapers. An electric under-slung monorail services all the main decks, with almost 3000 miles of track, train stations at every cargo lift, and stops within 100 yards of every elevator.

There are 6 main towns with populations of nearly 50,000 each, 54 villages with populations of a couple thousand each, and hundreds of watch-stations. It has a parcel delivery system with 102 postal codes. This system operates via ancient mag-lev pipes.

The vessel’s social structure is every bit as complicated as its physical structure. There are police, firefighters, lawyers and judges, plumbers and electricians, merchants that sell food and clothing, guilds that regulate work, commerce, and social activities, not to mention schools for the children on board. It’s a city of nearly half a million souls, with all the daily drudgery and drama that entails.

It also has a dark side. In addition to the domestic crimes and acts of passion that half a million souls can engage in, there is a black market for hard-to-obtain commodities and contraband. There is a mutant population that is restricted to working in the lower bilge decks. Some mutants are the result of generations of families subjected to the harsh stellar radiation of life in the void. More recent mutations are the result of working in radiated areas unprotected from the plasma conduits. Mutants are a persecuted minority aboard every ship. In addition to them are the ever-present hull-ghasts every ship gives rise to over time. These are criminals, mutants, and rejects of society that disappear into the labyrinthine tunnels. They live on vermin when a ship is lucky, and generate ship-wide man-hunts when they turn to human prey.

To put it another way, the ship has a main deck surface area greater than the surface area of New York City, or 40% the size of London (which has its surrounding greenbelt).

Now I have to sprint. I'm expected at my niece's swimming meet. I'll pick up this conversation later.

Ah. The Baum lifter, Quick's rendition of the Halo Barge. Yes, I use one almost exactly the same size, carrying 4 ISO containers (and the standard 4 varieties). Now back to the swim meet.

Sorry, I really wasn't trying to being an ass, but I know it's hard to tell sometimes when speaking with me. That was actually me poking fun at myself. Logistics was one my early careers in life, bores the dickens out of most people, but somehow seems to pique my curiosity.

You mention the recycle-ability of water and that brings up the same question in other life support, such as oxygen. There is a ship component for recycling people into servitors, and many people assume there's another producing corpse-starch. So yes, reusing resources has to figure into the conversation somewhere.

Wayfinder, my current players also use a Conquest. We've done our estimating about its measurements and I'm going to have to disagree with your math. Your example of the Seawise Giant is based on a hull measuring approx. 469m x 69m x 70m, giving us 2,265,270m ³ . You've stated that 2,265,270m ³ = 260,000 GRT. Le'ts run with that figure.

A Star Galleon measures 5100m x 700m x 1760m (that last measurement is based on the picture in BFK, not including spires of course), or 6,283,200,000m ³ . That means the galleon is actually about 2,700 times the size of the Seawise Giant, not 10 times.

I've said before, people have a hard time conceptualizing the insides of these ships, and their real size. Here is an excerpt of the description of the Fiat Justicia , the Star Galleon in our campaign.

The Fiat Justicia is an ancient ship, dating back to at least the 36th Millennia. The scale of the ship is difficult to imagine. While the crew numbers 65,000, there are entire households and communities on board, bringing the ship’s total population to nearly 400,000. There are 2 main cargo holds. Each is large enough to hold 400 Nimitz -class aircraft carriers. The ship has 79 main decks and over 500 lesser decks. There are nearly 10,000 miles of main corridors and over 25,000 miles of secondary passageways, not including crawl spaces. There are 672 passenger elevators and 32 enormous cargo lifts, each served by 8 ceiling-mounted cranes capable of lifting skyscrapers. An electric under-slung monorail services all the main decks, with almost 3000 miles of track, train stations at every cargo lift, and stops within 100 yards of every elevator.

There are 6 main towns with populations of nearly 50,000 each, 54 villages with populations of a couple thousand each, and hundreds of watch-stations. It has a parcel delivery system with 102 postal codes. This system operates via ancient mag-lev pipes.

The vessel’s social structure is every bit as complicated as its physical structure. There are police, firefighters, lawyers and judges, plumbers and electricians, merchants that sell food and clothing, guilds that regulate work, commerce, and social activities, not to mention schools for the children on board. It’s a city of nearly half a million souls, with all the daily drudgery and drama that entails.

It also has a dark side. In addition to the domestic crimes and acts of passion that half a million souls can engage in, there is a black market for hard-to-obtain commodities and contraband. There is a mutant population that is restricted to working in the lower bilge decks. Some mutants are the result of generations of families subjected to the harsh stellar radiation of life in the void. More recent mutations are the result of working in radiated areas unprotected from the plasma conduits. Mutants are a persecuted minority aboard every ship. In addition to them are the ever-present hull-ghasts every ship gives rise to over time. These are criminals, mutants, and rejects of society that disappear into the labyrinthine tunnels. They live on vermin when a ship is lucky, and generate ship-wide man-hunts when they turn to human prey.

To put it another way, the ship has a main deck surface area greater than the surface area of New York City, or 40% the size of London (which has its surrounding greenbelt).

Now I have to sprint. I'm expected at my niece's swimming meet. I'll pick up this conversation later.

That all works for me. I was just using quick rough figures to kind of reinforce your point. At least now I don't have to worry about how far I'm travelling; I can now think about delving into the Rifts of Hecaton without worrying what my crew's going to eat.

I've ginned up a bunch of vehicles.

Some various autocarriages (cars) from off-road dune buggies to a sports car esque thing.

A superheavy APC from Zayeth that doubles as a command post.

A dirigible aircraft carrier capable of taking on a wing of atmospheric craft (Figuring out how to get that one onto the ship was fun. They did a bit of damage to it, but managed to get it in. Still haven't deployed it anywhere.).

A power-loader-esque mini-mecha/construction bot from the dark age of technology.

A Heavy Lifter craft able to handle big loads (1000 tons or 500 people). It has plenty of structural integrity but crap armor and even worse manoeuvrability in combat than the Halo barge (out of combat it's the same).

I even put together my own stats for a Leman Russ before getting my hands on a copy of Only War.

As far as the whole "no possible way so few ships with so little capacity can supply/run a ship" bit goes, I noticed that too. I say ships have 1 small craft per 2 hull integrity with Halo barges taking up 2 spaces and Heavy Lifters taking up 4. Cargo hold/lighter bay also adds 10 craft to the limit and all the other types of cargo holds add 4. I also said the halo barge can handle 100 tons or 50 people.

Theoretically that's still not quite enough to do things expediently, but then when has expedience been the watch word of wh40k?

Oh and when my group started I gave them one gun cutter and their choice of Arvus/Halo's for the rest of the space. They had a good (50) starting profit factor, so I didn't mind them having a decent kit of shuttles and such to start.

What would a RT use? Well I think the Land Speeder, being an expensive rare open topped vehicle, would appeal aesthetically. Being pretty much the fastest land vehicle also gets them around at a good pace without becoming ***** (what? S.keet is censored? How is that offensive?). The air yacht might be something to convert to a pleasure craft, trading the animal holding pens for additional passenger space and luxury amenities, and the hunting weapons and nets with proper defensive weaponry.

Someone with a little heavier armored tastes would probably go with the chimera or rhino as a transport.

After that you're probably looking at aircraft, of which the Gun Cutter and the Aquila lander would probably be the most appealing.

Thanks for all the tips guys. gonna look through my BFK book about that with shuttles.

Anyway back to those Imperial knights. i have a grand finale battle in mind for the group and they gonna need those Knights to survive.

any good advice to use a template to go from? i think i saw Warhound scout titan in one of the DW books. could that be something to start with and tone it down quite a bit?